With "FRANKENSTEIN", Guillermo del Toro delivers the definitive tragedy of creator and creation

Guillermo del Toro’s FRANKENSTEIN is a lavish, epic-scale return to the source material—Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel—that honors the book’s roots as a philosophical tragedy rather than a simple horror tale. The film opens in a cold, vast 1857 setting near the Arctic, a fitting geographical metaphor for the isolation and despair to come, before flashing back to the opulent, yet emotionally sterile, world of Geneva.

Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), a brilliant, arrogant student of natural philosophy, is driven by an unnerving hubris and a lifelong obsession with conquering death, spurred by the tragic passing of his mother. Driven by his ambition to usurp the role of the divine, he succeeds in animating a colossal being (Jacob Elordi) pieced together from dead tissue.

In the electrifying, bombastic moment of creation, Victor is immediately repulsed by the scarred monstrosity he has unleashed, turning his back on the confused, childlike Creature. Abandoned and bewildered, the Creature is forced to navigate a hostile world, facing immediate rejection and cruelty from humanity. He embarks on a journey of self-discovery, learning language and companionship from a blind man, only to be violently cast out once more.

The Creature, realizing the true monstrousness lies in his creator's abandonment, vows vengeance. The film then becomes a desperate hunt, a brutal inversion of the father-son relationship, as Victor, consumed by the consequences of his ambition, pursues the being he brought to life, leading both creator and creation toward their inevitable, tragic confrontation in the freezing wilderness. The film also weaves in the sinister involvement of Dr. Pretorious, who seeks to exploit the Creature for his own unfinished scientific goals.

This is the film Guillermo del Toro was born to make. Every frame of FRANKENSTEIN—a project decades in the making—is drenched in the director’s lifelong passion for the Gothic, the macabre, and the deeply misunderstood monster. It is a work of uncommon visual beauty, one that cements Mary Shelley’s text as the tragic, existential cornerstone of modern fantasy and horror.

The film is, first and foremost, a technical and aesthetic triumph. Del Toro, working with a $120 million canvas, has conjured a world of breathtaking detail, making this the most expensive and arguably the most visually sumptuous Frankenstein ever committed to film. The visual style is unmistakably his: lush, intricate, and deeply indulgent. Scenes feel less like cinema and more like meticulously illustrated plates in a Victorian tome—a series of lovely, filigreed images that capture the essence of high-tech stained glass.

The director’s distinct color theory is everywhere, with shocks of red—in costume, in the blood-red angel visions Victor sees, and in the blood-stained tulle of Elizabeth's impossible dresses—signaling the violence and tragic passion fueling Victor’s transgression. The production design is a character unto itself; Victor’s magnificent, wrecked tower laboratory, perched precariously on a cliff, is a marvel of proto-scientific engineering, complete with gigantic, glowing green batteries. It’s clear that del Toro threw everything he had at this passion project, resulting in jaw-dropping visuals that will remain burned in the mind long after the credits roll.

The emotional core of the film hinges on its two central performances. Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein is the perfect Byronic figure—manic, brilliant, and hopelessly self-centered. Clad in provocatively loose clothing and red leather gloves, Isaac’s presence captures the terrifying ego of a man who sees playing God as an extension of his own decadent ambition. Victor’s cruelty is amplified by a compelling backstory that links his obsession with reanimating life to the trauma of his mother’s death in childbirth, exploring a heavy, Freudian subtext of parental guilt and replacement.

Yet, it is Jacob Elordi’s heartbreaking portrayal of the Creature that provides the film with its enduring soul. Buried under masterful prosthetic makeup, Elordi delivers a poignant, emotionally complex performance, capturing the Creature’s journey from a shy, barely verbal infant to a lonely, vengeful adult. He expertly employs the kind of slow, flowing gesticulations familiar from del Toro’s past monsters, conveying a profound inner life. The most effective section of the film is the extended segment where the Creature befriends a blind hermit, learning language, grace, and human empathy—lessons violently stripped away by the sighted world. Del Toro makes it abundantly clear that the real monstrousness lies not in the being, but in the creator who suffers from the profound moral degradation caused by his own rejection.

The film’s reverence for Mary Shelley’s text is profound. It cleaves closely to the novel’s structure, most notably by shifting the narrative perspective to the Creature, allowing him to rebut Victor's version of events and articulate the agony of his forced existence. Del Toro treats the Creature with a tenderness that, at times, surpasses even Shelley's novel, underscoring the themes of societal alienation and the catharsis of forgiveness.

In its ambition, however, the film is occasionally indulgent. Its stately pace and a near two-and-a-half-hour runtime may frustrate some viewers, and there are moments where the film lurches tonally between lush romantic melodrama and moments of Grand Guignol bloodletting. The screenplay, while deeply passionate, occasionally undercuts the quieter, more delicate emotional moments by being slightly on-the-nose. Furthermore, the final chase to the Arctic, which provides the framing narrative, feels somewhat truncated in a way that suggests material was crammed into the runtime.

Despite these minor fluctuations, the sturdiness of the craft and the power of its central tragedy cannot be ignored. FRANKENSTEIN is a powerful, gorgeous, and necessary philosophical reflection on mankind's capacity for cruelty, the death we bring on ourselves through war, and the trauma that makes us. It is epic-scale storytelling of uncommon artistry, reinforcing the idea that this story—the story of a creator who cannot control how his work is received—is fundamentally autobiographical for a filmmaker obsessed with misunderstood creatures.